The tart is a baked ganache, scented with orange zest and rum, topped with chopped hazelnuts, in a sweet pastry crust. A final drizzle of chocolate makes a simple decoration.

Cherries and almonds are an easy flavor combination; they’re botanically related, though distant cousins, and the perfume of almonds is a perfect complement to the tartness of sour cherries.

I love pineapple, but supermarket pineapples are frequently disappointing, so I developed a pineapple confit to sweeten and concentrate the fruit for this tart. The confit takes some time to prepare, but it’s worth the extra effort.

This light and delicate tart filling is based on the popular Indian drink that’s not unlike a mango smoothie. In India, mango lassi is sometimes perfumed with a few pinches of ground cardamom. If you’d like to try that combination, just sprinkle a little on the tart right before serving or pass some ground cardamom in a tiny bowl for the guests to add on their own if desired.

I’ve often confessed in the past to being addicted to crumb topping. Recently I even found a new way to enjoy it—atop a tart that has a prebaked crust and a creamy filling. This does necessitate the extra step of baking the crumb topping separately, but you can do that while baking the tart crust. The crisp crumb topping with a hint of chopped almonds is a perfect contrast to this tart’s light cream cheese filling and juicy strawberries

This is based on a similar tart made by Philippe Conticini at his Pâtisserie des Rêves shop in Paris. I was struck by a photo of the tart topped with a wave of meringue. Fortunately M. Conticini was forthcoming with his method for achieving this unique effect.

Tart fillings made from greens such as spinach are always difficult to salt properly: too much and the tart’s inedible, too little and you risk expiring from boredom after a forkful or two. Adding bacon to this spinach filling helps, because the spinach itself then may be very lightly salted since you’ll have little bursts of salty bacon flavor in every bite.

This was always one of the most popular items sold by my Total Heaven Baking Company in the early 1980s. Poaching the pears first is a little extra work, but you can do it up to five days in advance of assembling and baking the tart; just chill them in their poaching liquid. The variations possible with this tart are almost infinite—just change the fruit or the nuts in the filling.

Nothing could be simpler—or better—than this tart.The flavor of the filling is of course entirely dependent on the quality of the chocolate you use, so hang the budget and get the best available—you only need a single pound.

The tart is a baked ganache, scented with orange zest and rum, topped with chopped hazelnuts, in a sweet pastry crust. A final drizzle of chocolate makes a simple decoration.